Whose Price

Two hundred years of philosophy keeps slamming into the same question: is a human being free, or just under an illusion? Sartre said: absolutely free, and therefore guilty in every cell. His opponents: first look at which cell she was born into, then judge. Strange thing is that this argument can’t be settled in a study. It gets closed by one inconvenient question. And it all starts with something small.

Sartre gave it a name: mauvaise foi, bad faith. When a person passes off their own choice as necessity. His café waiter moves so precisely, so mechanically, he plays the waiter as the job he chose never to quit, as his very nature, the way a table is a table. Sartre said: man is “condemned to be free,” and that’s exactly why he runs from himself. Easier to pretend you’re a finished object, calm, free of the anxiety of choice, than to remain someone who must choose anew at every moment. We all know how to do this, and best of all with the small things.

I’ve been meaning to try CrossFit. For a long time. I go swimming instead. That’s why I’m still just “meaning to.”

Swimming where I already know how. No risk of embarrassment. Bad faith in its purest form: “meaning to” sounds like intention, but works as an excuse.

Water takes the thoughts away. In it, I exist in full agreement with everything around me, and it doesn’t matter what I am: person, other creature, object. Water is the place where I am calm.

And here’s the trap. Real calm is a rare guest. But the cage also grants calm, only it’s permanent. And the longer it lasts, the more it resembles nature; the pause gets forgotten. That’s where a person stops choosing without noticing they’ve stopped.

Looks like weakness of will. Science says the opposite.

When my mind is stagnant, I’m passive. Everything suits me. When an idea is burning, I’m someone else. And in between, I adjust to what I can’t change.

For half a century, the theory of “learned helplessness” taught that repeated failure makes you give up. Then in 2016, Maier and Seligman, the very authors who launched it in 1967, revisited their own work and admitted the opposite. Passivity is innate, the default setting. What we learn is the reverse: the sense that control is in our hands. So “everything suits me” arrives first, as the default, and only masquerades as a conclusion of maturity. “Adjusting to what I can’t change” is sometimes wisdom. Sometimes just a button never pressed.

I truly don’t know how. For myself, I know. For others, no. For myself, I at least set some safeguards. For others, I can’t help.

This is where the two collide. Sartre: you are always and unconditionally free, therefore the cage is always your choice. Beauvoir, his own ally, pushed back in The Ethics of Ambiguity: freedom doesn’t float in a void. It’s always in a situation, and situations are glaringly unequal. For someone truly oppressed, someone else put up the bars, and calling it “self-deception” is possible only from a safe distance. But she added the bitter part: even then, complicity in one’s own unfreedom remains a temptation hard to renounce.

Who’s right? Both, halfway. The missing half comes from one question.

Those who don’t do, don’t grow; I know that. But “try and adjust” rests on the cost of error. When I pay the cost, it’s learning. When someone else pays it, irreversibly, “faster, we’ll refine it later” becomes a different word. I don’t know how to look at that strategically.

There it is. Whose cost? When you pay it yourself, Sartre is right, and “I’m still preparing” is most often your own bad faith. When someone else pays it, irreversibly, Beauvoir is right, and thoroughness becomes conscience; the cage has vanished. The old dispute about freedom gets closed by one thing: whose head your mistake lands on. Theory doesn’t matter here.

Easiest thing in the world is shifting the cost onto someone else. And then living with it?

Turns out, it’s easy. Most people shift it and don’t reproach themselves. Strange creature, the human being: invented morality by itself, and by itself, when convenient, sheds it easily. That’s why “whose cost” isn’t innate conscience. It’s something you have to hold on your own, because there’s no one else to do it.

From here it’s one step to a beautiful lie. The idea that hardship hardens, that the one who suffered has seen the truth. The data says otherwise: researchers consider a significant portion of “post-traumatic growth” to be an illusion. In one cohort of soldiers, those who reported the most growth five months after returning home had the most severe trauma symptoms at the ten-month mark. The expectation that pain ennobles merely pressures you to hide the pain and builds a new cage. Frankl, who survived the camps, doesn’t romanticize. He called pain, guilt, and death the “tragic triad” and insisted: meaning is possible in spite of them; the triad itself gives no meaning. First, do everything to remove the cause of suffering; search for meaning in it only when avoidance is no longer possible. Suffering is not a ticket to meaning.

“Limit” isn’t the right word here. This level of fluctuation already exists. And once something boundless has taken it on, I have no right to treat it irresponsibly.

The refusal to look at people strategically, as acceptable losses, is a spine.

The easiest thing to say: I’m gestating a plan. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s a fine name for having gotten used to it and stopped looking for the door.

I tell others I’m ready for the hardest thing. And I myself am not sure I’d dare a second time, because I already know what it really is.

My age flows on. And instead of an aging calm, I would rather live a little longer in the way I myself deem worthy. This is a cost I choose to pay alone, and only here is the choice entirely mine.